I was reading a post on ABestWeb, where someone asked what people would do if they had $10,000 to spend on their affiliate business. The general feeling was that it would be hard to spend that much money. Sure, you could spend it all on PPC or paying people to create content or write programs for you to make running your sites easier, but most felt spending so much really is not necessary. The question assumed an experienced affiliate already earning money.

It just got me to thinking - how many businesses can you say that about? Affiliate marketing can be done with very little monetary investment. Having good ideas and implementing them well is far more important to your success than just spending money. Don’t forget patience, of course.

If I had that kind of money, I’d first hire a programmer so I could work some of my sites more efficiently. I may very well look into hiring a programmer in the next few months anyhow, if I can get what I want on a tight budget. I’m not to a point yet where I’d be comfortable spending a lot, even knowing that with good implementation I’d quickly earn my investment back. Still have to eat and have a place to live, after all, and get rid of my credit card debt. After that I’ll have more room to play.

I keep debating whether to hire a programmer or just learn to do it myself. Advantages to each, certainly. I have studied a few programming languages, so learning PHP doesn’t sound too hard. At the same time, I suspect my time could be better spent running my sites rather than messing around with programming.

But the simple truth of the matter is that you don’t HAVE to spend tons of money to succeed in affiliate marketing. That doesn’t make it easy; far from it. It takes hard work and lots of thought. You have to decide if you’re building sites that will last for a long time and be loved by the search engines or if you don’t mind them getting banned regularly, or if you’re somewhere inbetween.

Perhaps one of the best things about affiliate marketing is that you can do it on your own schedule. Yes, the more time you can spend on it the sooner you will see results, but even if you can only spend time on it after the kids are in bed it’s a business you can run. You can work on topics you love or just do it because you love the money you bring in. You can go do fun things with your family on a whim. You can check on your business from anywhere in the world.

My one regret about affiliate marketing is that I didn’t discover it sooner.

I finally took the time to get my new business license for my new address. That’s one of the pains of moving - having to go redo all the paperwork for my home business. Both the license and the business name have to be redone any time you move. Considering that this is the second move this year, it was really not fun having to go through all that again. Maybe we can stay here a while.

As things get more settled here, I keep working on my business. One thing I have to work on is keeping focused. It’s so easy to jump from idea to idea when the ideas just keep flowing so easily. But if you don’t finish a site at least reasonably before starting on the next, how well will it really earn any money? That’s something I always have to keep in mind. I’m having to refocus myself on the site I was working on just before the move, even though I have a stack of ideas from the time when I didn’t have an internet connection and could not work on my sites.

Organization is probably one of my weak points. I can find things when I need them, but it’s mostly by digging until I find them. Add to that the fact that I just finished a move, and things are pretty hectic here. Is it any wonder organization of records is on my mind?

Now, I’m not about to run out and spend a bunch of money to improve my organization. I have places to file things; I just haven’t taken advantage of what I have. So that’s the obvious place to start.

The paperwork I’ve filed to make my home business legal at my new address is one of the first things I need to organize. Need to know when to renew my license next year, and such. I also really need to keep better track of my check stubs, so I don’t have to scramble around finding them at tax time, which is, of course quarterly.

No matter your business, you need to be able to keep track of your earnings and expenditures. After all, if you spend it for your business, you can probably deduct it from your taxes. I know I’ve missed out on deductions for not keeping adequate records. So there’s another something I need to track better, probably through a combination of filed paper receipts plus tracking in Excel to make it easier to come up with the totals later.

I only do limited advertising, but that’s another area to keep careful records on. You want to know when the ad ran, what it cost and how effective it was, both in terms of traffic and ROI. ROI can be a little tricky, since you never know if people just bookmarked your site and buy later. But you have to track what you can and have a newsletter or other means to encourage people to come back, to make the most of those who don’t buy right away. Even if the initial ad doesn’t make them buy, you can try to get another shot at the sale.

Probably the thing I file best are my Bookmarks. I have a tremendous number of folders in my bookmarks, and many have multiple subfolders. It may sound difficult, but it allows me to find bookmarks that would otherwise be effectively lost forever. I don’t recall the statistic, but I do know a somewhat low number of bookmarks are ever looked at again. I try to avoid doing that myself, although I do regularly come up with items that I haven’t looked at in years.

Proper records will help your business in many ways. Well kept paper records will make it easier for you to show proof of earnings and expenditures in case you need them, while electronic records can allow you to track things particular to how you are running your business. Take a little time and try to get your business organized.

And look what happens!

I was offline for a few days because we moved. No fun being offline when you have an online business, but aside from once borrowing my mother’s computer, I didn’t have a connection to use for a few days. Come back to find new AdSense terms and some AdWords changes too.

I like the new AdSense stats formats, though, I must say.

My sites did well in my absence, thank goodness. It’s really hard on me turning my back on them for any length of time, especially my discussion board. Only one spammer at the time, which makes me very glad I added visual confirmation to the registration. It really seems to be keeping a lot of the spam out. Of course, I’ve only had it there for a couple weeks, so we’ll see, but I’m definitely getting fewer junk registrations, and since it only impacts registration, not posting, it is not a real incovenience to other users.

If you have a newsletter, I hope you’re paying attention to these. I’m sure they’ll be challenged legally soon enough, but for now they spell trouble.

What’s the problem? These laws allow parents to sign up any email address their children have access to, and if you email them with anything that has any link to a page with information on something the child shouldn’t be accessing (information on alcohol, firearms, drugs, gambling or adult material) or even links on that page to such information, you’re breaking that law. It doesn’t matter if they double opted into your site, any email address on that list is forbidden for anyone sending such information. Financial topics such as mortgage and credit may also be impacted.

What can you do? No one is quite sure how to handle this one yet. If you think your list is at risk, you can purge your list every time against their list, but that will be time consuming and costly, as there is a charge for advertisers to access the list.

Now, one thing you will want to be aware of is that individuals can sue under these laws. Yes, they could sign up a forbidden email address then sue you for sending email to it. You’re the one who is supposed to know better than to send emails to it if your topic or ads on your pages are on the forbidden list.

No, CAN-SPAM doesn’t override this one, at least not until the courts say otherwise.

As a parent, I would also worry about the list being hacked. There are plenty of unethical marketers who will build a list any way they can. This list isn’t just about email addresses either. It will have cell phone and other contact information on children.

Utah seems to be going pretty strongly on the idea of protecting children from all offensive content on the internet. They’re being sued by the ACLU because they are trying to create a registry of offensive websites, which could be construed as blocking interstate commerce. ISPs would be required to block listed sites at the request of parents.

Now, I understand parents don’t want their kids seeing offensive material, but I really think it’s up to the parents to take control of how their children use the internet. By these rules, any site with even a little inappropriate material, say, books on the wrong topic, could be blocked, even though the site overall is not offensive. I don’t know how they expected to handle websites from outside Utah, since the law requires that content providers rate their content and submit to the registry. Who outside of Utah would know to do this? How difficult would it be to keep up with dozens of states doing this?

Realistically, I think that these are things that need to be national laws if they are to be laws at all, and probably aren’t appropriate for the government to handle anyhow. It’s too easy to fall into censorship when you get into this ground. Since the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, individual state laws are simply impratical, so national laws are the nearest to making sense.

I’m trying Google Sitermaps now. I’ve submitted for a few of my sites, now I just have to wait and see what results I get.

I tried several of the free tools Google recommends. The online ones are generally limited to a few hundred urls per map, which may not be adequate for you. I liked GSiteCrawler fairly well, although I would have liked to be able to set some of the defaults myself.

You can also buy tools to do this, although I haven’t tried any. I’ve gotten various emails telling me that this guru or that knows how to get a Google Sitemap made, and they’re pretty much trying to get you on a list and tell you about the free ones you can find out about from Google on your own, or selling one, such as this sitemap generator. Now, the paid ones may do better, if they do allow you to set some of the default values that were my complaint in the free one I used; I don’t know.

So sorry I haven’t been posting. Those who follow my Work at Home in Progress blog may be aware that I got hit with a surprise 30-day notice on my condo because the owner’s daughter is going to move in. Nothing like hunting for a new place to live to cut down on the time you can spend on business. But we finally have everything settled… well, except packing! But we have just under 2 weeks left now, so don’t expect this to lead to a bunch of posting.

Maybe after the move I’ll finally get the first issue of the newsletter out! I’ve been putting it off and putting it off because of various personal issues that would keep me from paying it proper attention and finding the right quality of articles.